Those switches look like they are the mini generators from ZF Electronics that produce 0.33 mWs of power per activation.
ZF Electronics used to be called Cherry Industrial, which was until a few years ago part of the same company as Cherry AG who make the famous keyboard switches.
I dream of a DMG-1000, an original gameboy with a thousand hours battery life because it would have a CPU made with modern technology. This is actually DMG-Infinite! Amazing. Thanks for sharing.
Presumably the resistance of a typical laptop keyboard is set to get the correct feel, not like a minimum mechanical resistance to get it to work at all, so there must be energy that is currently dissipated as heat that could be harvested for free, in principle without changing the feel.
> I remember manual typewriters - they were a hideous, miserable experience.
They were just the thing to write rants on, you could truly put some feeling into your writing. Rant loud enough and you'd type holes instead of o's. Overdo that underline and it'd end up splitting the page for real.
Having grown up with a non-Selectric typewriter, I'd be okay with a charging crank that mimicked the action of a manual carriage return that I had to shove to the left at the end of each line of code when the editor goes "ding!". But I'm not sure where it could be mounted on a laptop.
I've considered adding a few small geared stepper motors as a combination input device (scroll wheel, or two for etch-a-sketch cursor control) and energy harvester.
It's a slight exaggeration how frequent parens are used in Lisp. The keys tab, space, shift, backspace, hyphen enter are probably used more often, and many alphanumeric keys.
Perhaps you could have the whole keyboard floating on a pivot like a see-saw, with one of these switches beneath it at the right and left side of the pivot (say beneath s and ; keys). That way any key press off-center would have a chance of activating one of the two switches, and keys closest to the far left and right would have a greater probability of activating them. The keyboard would have a slight wobble.
on that one, a little capacitor in the parenthesis keys would probably make that solar panel unnecessary.